Welcome to Patsy’s Paddocks!
Here I share my stories – family stories, stories from land records (hence the paddocks in my title), how I found them and methodologies from my genealogy toolbox.
I have been interested in family and local history it seems forever. I have been gathering stories about my family and the selectors whose paddocks I rode across as a child before I even realised what I was doing. On meeting someone for the first time I still have to explain where I fit in the family and where I lived as a child.
So, as I walked to catch my horse at the bottom of Irvine’s paddocks or rode home across Campbell’s and the middle Farie or listened to stories such as how Mary was bucked off into the daffodils in Davenport’s, I began to wonder about the original selectors – William Learmonth on Ettrick, Thomas Browne on Squattleseamere and Charles Macknight, James Irvine and William Campbell on Dunmore. I also wondered about those that followed – Robert Farie, Henry Davenport, Samuel Baulch and two of this older brothers – Henry and George.
I’m still interested in family and local history but with a focus on land selection. This interest hasn’t changed.
What has changed has the availability in source material. Consequently, with experience of many searches and new ways of accessing material my research methodologies as stored in my virtual family history toolbox have been refined and are still being refined.
With databases of DNA matches for family history purposes growing exponentially over the last few years until they have almost reached a critical mass, my DNA research methodologies finally seem to be coming together.
The thought of writing a full family history or the history of a pastoral run still daunts me. So here I share snippets. Together they may give some sense of the whole and there is always a story about the methodology I used or the discovery I made along the way. So here I share some of my family stories and some of my research methodologies. In short articles that are manageable. Like small paddocks but which, taken together, may build to my legacy of family stories.
I do hope you enjoy these stories which are not only mine but in most cases can only be told because of the stories told to me by my family and friends.